Space or hyperspace? : the stage design of Kunqu opera restores the inner experience of Jiangnan gardens

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ENVIRONMENTS BY DESIGN

HEALTH, WELLBEING AND PLACE

Sustainable Architecture(s) Humane Cities

AMPS Proceedings Series 29.1

HEALTH, WELLBEING AND PLACE

A conference on design, cuture and technology - past, present and future

(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

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AMPS PROCEEDINGS SERIES 29.1

AMPS, University of Kent. 15-17 June, 2022

(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S): Design,

culture and technology – past, present, and

future

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EDITOR:

Howard Griffin

EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION EDITOR:

Amany Marey

© AMPS

AMPS PROCEEDINGS SERIES 29.1. ISSN 2398-9467

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INTRODUCTION

(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S): Design,

culture and technology – past, present, and future

The buildings, towns and cities we inhabit are physical entities created in the past, experienced in the present, and projected to inform the future. The same can be said of the artefacts we use daily:

designed furniture in the home, the mobile devices in our hands, the vehicles we see on our streets.

However, each of these places, buildings and products had, at their inception, social and cultural roles beyond their ‘object’ status. They continue to have them today. What we understand a designed object to be then, is a complex question of material and social import, and an intricate play of the tangible and intangible identities. Increasingly, it is also a question of hybrid experiences and overlaid histories. This conference addresses the range of issues connected to this scenario.

The complexity described above is even more pronounced in the case of digital artefacts and experiences such as computational design, VR simulations of ancient buildings, mobile apps, digital photography or virtual exhibitions. Intangible at the very moment of their inception, such designed artifacts not only blur the difference between the object and the experience, but, increasingly, the past and the present. Computer generated imagery creates ‘life like’ reconstructions of historic sites. Laser scanning gives archeologists glimpses of pasts erased long ago. Computational design gives

designers instant recordings of their work in progress. Coupled with digital cataloguing, it gives us the instant asynchronous design archive.

Considered in this context it is not surprising that recently questions about the nature of heritage and design have opened up to redefinitions of the tangible and the intangible. In responding to this scenario the work of the authors collected in this publication present a diverse range of perspectives from various fields including art, architecture, design and cultural studies, to name but a few. They present reconsiderations of ‘heritage’ as both a tangible and an intangible concept and overlay our notions of the digital, on ideas of heritage and concepts of physicality and the present.

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SPACE OR HYPERSPACE? THE STAGE DESIGN OF KUNQU OPERA RESTORES THE INNER EXPERIENCE OF JIANGNAN GARDENS

Authors:

YU YANG^a, WENYU QI^a, LINLI ZHANG^b Affiliation:

a UNIVERSITY OF LISBON, PORTUGAL, b LANCASTER UNIVERSITY, UK.

INTRODUCTION

Since the 1990s, nine Suzhou gardens have been included in the “UNESCO World Heritage List”.¹ Correspondingly, in 2001, UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) declared Kunqu Opera “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity”.² Of these two, one is a model of classical Chinese gardens, and the other represents Chinese elegant performing arts. They were all born in the traditional Jiangnan region of China centred on Suzhou City. There is a close relationship in the development process, which is reflected in,

1) In terms of artistic expression, the philosophical term “emptiness and fullness create each other”

can be used to describe both Jiangnan gardens and the artistic characteristics of Kunqu Opera.³ 2) Jiangnan gardens and Kunqu Opera have evident intertextuality — a space for Kunqu Opera performances is often set up in garden design, and Kunqu Opera playwrights often describe garden scenes in their scripts.

This commonality is not accidental. As Georgi Plekhanov puts it, “[t]he art of any people is determined by its mentality; its mentality is a product of its situation,”⁴ Jiangnan gardens, Kunqu Opera, and even poetry and painting, which respectively mean spatial art, oral culture, literature, and graphic art, share the concept of “emptiness and fullness create each other”.

The following points must be clarified before discussing the hyper-space relationship between gardens as material cultural heritage and Kunqu Opera as intangible cultural heritage:

1) What are the hyper-space characteristics that poetry, painting, gardens, and Kunqu opera collectively embody?

2) How the commonality of the four art forms spans dimensions, that is, from nothingness (poetry), to two-dimensional (painting), then from two-dimensional to three-dimensional (garden space), and finally three-dimensional transition to “hyper-space” (stage design)?

3) What trend will the hyper-spatial nature of gardens develop in the future stage design of Kunqu Opera?

Influence of Aesthetic Principles of Poetic Painting on Garden’s Hyper-Space

A new art form called poetic painting, which represented “the idea that poetry and painting can be virtually interchangeable in their content,”⁵ first appeared in China at the end of the eleventh century, according to East Asian art historian James Cahill (1926–2014)’s book The Lyric Journey (1996).

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This kind of painting became a fashion that people were chasing in the Vanity Fair of the literati class at that time. For example, the famous poet and painter Su Tung-po (1037–1101) wrote in his poem, Painters since ancient times have not been ordinary fellows.

Their marvellous thoughts have the same origin as poetry.⁶

A common phenomenon in that era was that “[good] painters [often] are praised as ‘being like poets’”.⁷ This aesthetic phenomenon of transitioning from poetry to poetic painting means that the viewer’s “experience” spans from language to visual art. According to Cahill, the “experience” of poetic painting is that “one gazes at the scene from outside it, without the imagined participation.”⁸ In a sense, vision becomes the main way of “experience” for the viewer in viewing poetic paintings. The non-perspective long scroll composition of ancient East Asian paintings, due to the lack of a visual centre, would result in visual continuity in the way of viewing, and this “visual continuity that the master of monumental landscape […] could impart to the terrain of their pictures presents the world as traversable, stable, ultimately comprehensible.”⁹ During the viewing process, the viewer can obtain information from the symbols of the painting to enhance their spiritual experience, “one can move smoothly through their pictures, sometimes taking in entire mountains or forests as visual units, sometimes coming in for close-up views that reveal abundant detail to exploring eye.”¹⁰ The painting methodology essay “Lin-ch’üan Kao-chih (

林泉高致

)”¹¹(11th Century AD) in the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) believes that painting that can bring a sense of travel and living experience is better than painting that can only make people look at the scenery.¹² This view means that the experience of poetic painting gradually changes from visual aesthetic to spatial aesthetic feeling.

The experience of space in the viewing process has become the highest criterion of poetic painting. In the process, the painter will deliberately sacrifice the expressive power of the brush to avoid the visual experience of realism.¹³ This supreme principle even influences the design of their own living spaces.¹⁴

From the above content, it can be concluded that the garden design methodology in Jiangnan has a direct relationship with the “experience” aesthetics of poetic painting. In other words, “experience” is beyond space, an aesthetic principle that both painting composition and garden design follow. So how should this “experience” be understood? What is the relationship between this “experience” and the stage design of Kunqu Opera?

Hyper-Spacial Simulation Rules of Modern Kunqu Opera Stage

There are two ways of dealing with walls in Jiangnan garden design; one is called “obstructive scenery”, and the other is called “borrowed scenery.”¹⁵ Obstructive scenery means a wall (or obstacle) blocks the landscape behind it, allowing the viewer to bypass the wall and experience a completely different space. The borrowed scenery creates an opening in the middle of a barrier, through which the landscape of another space is presented to the viewer (sometimes a door, sometimes a window).

These two approaches to setting up obstacles in the garden represent the relationship between the mountain and the surrounding landscape in the poetic painting. After the discussion in the first section, a logical connection can be drawn here; the painting is trying to simulate poetry, while the garden is trying to imitate painting. To sum up, when the aesthetics of one art type, A, applies to another art type, B, B will try to restore the feeling that A brings to the audience. The reason why Kunqu Opera is hyper-spatial is that the stage design of Kunqu Opera simulates the garden, which in turn simulates painting, and the painting simulates poetry. However, the criticism of poetry is more of an aesthetic experience. Nonetheless, this experience is constantly being enshrined as the highest aesthetic principle by other art categories, which leads to this hyper-spatial experience. From the

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following four-stage design cases for The Peony Pavilion in Kunqu Opera, we can see why this retrospective simulation (Type B simulates Type A) is the key to hyper-spatiality.

There are differences in the restoration of “experience” in modern Kunqu Opera stage design, and these disagreements turned into various attempts at “simulation” in different senses. In the existing 1960 video of Master Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) performing a Kunqu Opera named The Peony Pavilion, it is not difficult to find that the entire stage set is trying to simulate a real garden scene. For example, in the indoor scene at the film’s opening, there are two types of borrowed scenery, a nearby door and a distant window, which simulate the depth of field in a garden (see fig.1).

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of the scene made according to Mei’s version.

However, in the 1983 version of The Peony Pavilion by another Kunqu Opera master Zhang Jiqing (1939–2022), the spatial “simulation” was intentionally weakened. The substantial depth of field design in Mei’s version is ignored in Zhang’s version. Compared with Mei’s version, Zhang’s version is visually flattened. The borrowed scenery is directly represented here as a circular window (the Mei version adds a circular doorway). Stage space no longer has another borrowed scenery to increase the space level (see fig. 2). This version shows another direction of stage design; the simulation of pure garden space by Kunqu Opera sets has gradually become the simulation of aesthetic principles. Just as the poetic painters of the Song Dynasty abandoned the technique of realism, this is the result of the designer’s thinking on the rules of hyper-spatial “simulation”. “Experience” has a new trend in this edition; that is, it goes beyond the simulation of space and tries to return to the universal poetic aesthetic criterion.

Figure 2. Schematic diagram of the scene made according to Zhang’s version.

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In 2004, writer Pai Hsien-yung (1937–) designed a new version of The Peony Pavilion’s stage. Pai introduced the musical’s lighting system, separating the protagonist, supporting roles and actors, making the audience’s visual focus more concentrated.¹⁶ Compared with the previous versions of Mei and Zhang, this version completely abandons the practice of dividing space with obstacles. In the stage setting in Mei’s version, a round door opening (near wall) and a round window (far wall) increase the depth of field to reflect the relationship between emptiness and fullness in space. Zhang’s version weakens the depth of field and perspective, focusing on the use of non-space to enhance the viewer’s experience of emptiness. When Pai’s version completely abandoned the stage set and switched to using lights, the use of obstacles to simulate a garden to create an experience of emptiness was transformed into the use of stage lights to reflect the relationship between emptiness and fullness.

Obstacles (fullness) - openings (emptiness) transform into dark stage spaces (emptiness) - beams (fullness). The transformation of this expression material means transitioning from the past garden material simulation to the garden “experience” concept. The direction of this material revolution is worthy of recognition, just as poetic painting uses pigments to re-express the “experience” created by poetry, and the Kunqu Opera stage uses lighting to eliminate the dependence on the materiality of gardens gradually.

Figure 3. Pa’s version of The Peony Pavilion.

In addition, there is currently a fourth version, which is widely influential, dating back to the “Salon Edition” in 2007.¹⁷ The famous Kunqu Opera actor Wang Shiyu (1941–) used a Ming and Qing Dynasty imperial granary on Beijing’s Dongsishi Aly Street as the venue and performed The Peony Pavilion here according to the specifications of an ancient private garden. This version restored the historical performance form—performing arts troupes in the Ming and Qing Dynasties would perform in private gardens.¹⁸ Kunqu opera performances influenced by this model were called “salon versions” (Tingtang version). The Salon version was as commercially successful as Bai’s version, but it took a very different path from Bai’s version regarding stage design. Although behaviorally, the Salon Edition can easily be attributed to vulgar antiquity, from another perspective, it can be seen as a new exploration of “simulation.“ Just imagine, in history, is not the act of gardening practice of poetic painting also an attempt to make an alternative attempt from a material point of view? From the perspective of the relationship between Kunqu Opera and gardens, the meaning of hyper-space has much room for interpretation and enormous plasticity in material practice.

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Figure 4. Still from the Salon edition of Six Records of a Floating Life (

浮生六記

).

Interpretation Flexibility — Hyper-spatiality of Kunqu Opera Stage Materials

The above briefly describes the development process of contemporary Kunqu stage sets. The four cases represent,

1) the direct imitation of the materiality of the garden by the stage setting of Kunqu Opera;

2) the restoration of the poetic aesthetics of the Kunqu Opera stage set;

3) the Kunqu Opera stage set began to undergo an innovation in the realization of materials, using the light and shadow on the stage to re-interpret the “simulation experience”;

4) another development trend of the Kunqu Opera stage sets fully emphasizes the “restore” of the senses, emphasizing the performance in the actual scene.

The third and the fourth are the two primary development directions of the Kunqu Opera stage set after 2000, reflecting the flexible interpretation of the experience of hyper-spatiality.

Such attempts have never stopped. In 2017, Qianhui Feng from University College London (UCL)’s Interactive Architecture Lab made an experimental art project on Kunqu Opera. The project uses the current pioneering stage design concepts, namely interactive performance, and immersive theatre, through a combination of live-action performances and large-scale projection installations, allowing the audience to immerse and gain an interactive experience. This project is very different from the previous Kunqu Opera stage design cases because the experience is comprehensive, combining different types of “simulations.“

First, it exists to simulate the garden space. The stage area has an isolation zone between the performance and audience areas (see fig. 5 [right]). This mode restores the classical stage mode of garden Kunqu Opera. For example, there is a pond outside the Kunqu Opera stage building in the Humble Administrator’s Garden to separate the audience from the stage (see fig. 5 [left, middle]).

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Figure 5. Plan of Kunqu Opera Stage at Humble Administrator’s Garden (left, middle) Plan of Qianhui Feng’s Immersive Kunqu Opera Theatre Installation (right)

Second, this project attempts to simulate the viewer’s experience of traditional gardens. To be precise, she uses the method of displacement, that is, to simulate and reconstruct the experience effect brought by the materials of the garden through heterogeneous materials. For example, the usual practice of obstructive scenery and borrowed scenery techniques in traditional Jiangnan Garden design is to use opaque obstacles, such as walls, rockeries, or plants. On the other hand, Feng uses light, soft, translucent materials to hang from the frame structure like banners, which are both obstacles and transparent. So, this new type of obstacle simulates the “obstructive scenery” and “borrowed scenery”

technologies that should not coexist on a traditional obstacle (see fig. 6).

Figure 6. Still from Qianhui Feng’s Immersive Kunqu Opera Theatre Installation — Inner Awareness.

CONCLUSION

The Kunqu Opera stage and Jiangnan gardens have inseparable historical origins. Even in the current stage design of Kunqu Opera, this origin cannot be eliminated. Kunqu Opera stage designers in different periods used different angles, such as forms, materials, and aesthetic principles, to create a sense of the experience of the cultural mood. This experience is hyper-spatial. It comes from the transfer of poetry theory in Chinese cultural history. The transition process is rough in that painting gradually appropriated the aesthetic criteria of poetry as its own, gardens appropriated the aesthetic criteria of painting, and the stage design of Kunqu Opera also appropriated the aesthetic standards of

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gardens similarly. Nevertheless, this aesthetic criterion is poetic and gives hyper-spatiality in the transfer process.

So, what are the new trends in the current stage design of Kunqu Opera? Judging from the five classic cases of the modern Kunqu Opera stage, this trend can be summarized as the simulation of gardens in form and the deconstruction of the “experience” of gardens in terms of materials. Feng admitted that she tried to “recompose and redefine the world of dramaturgy in the digital age to achieve the desired results of interactivity and immersion” through this project.¹⁹ Although this sentence may seem exaggerated, it is undeniable that Feng’s project has achieved a breakthrough in the existing Kunqu Opera stage design experience to a certain extent. The hyper-spatial aesthetic shared by poetry, painting, gardens, and Kunqu Opera has reached new heights in Feng’s project.

In short, the hyper-spatial nature of the Kunqu Opera stage must become a new idea for the future Kunqu Opera stage design to achieve better cultural connection from ancient poetry and painting to gardens.

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NOTES

1 See “Classical Gardens of Suzhou” in “World Heritage List,” UNESCO World Heritage Convention, accessed June 21, 2022, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/

2 See “2018 Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity,” UNESCO Intagible Cultural Heritage, accessed June 21, 2022, https://ich.unesco.org/en/lists

3 Original Chinese text: 虛實相生. This translation references “being and non-being create each other” (Laozi 2015, ch. 2), and “[e]mpties their heart/minds, fills their stomachs” (Laozi, ch. 3). The Baidu Encyclopedia entry suggests that the term can describe poetry and paintings.

4 Georgi Plekhanov, “Unaddressed Letters, First Letter,” in Georgi Plekhanov Selected Philosophical Works, Volume 5, trans. K. M. Cook and A. Fineberg, 263–294 (1899–1900; repr., Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981), 295.

5 James Cahill, The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK:

Harvard University, 1996), 8.

6 Original text: “古來畫師非俗士，摹寫物象略與詩人同.” See Cahill, 8.

7 Cahill, 8.

8 Cahill, 9.

9 Cahill, 9.

10 Cahill, 19–19.

11 Original text:”林泉高致.” It means “Lofty Messages of Forests and Streams.” But in The Chinese Theory of Art, Lin Yutang translated it as: “A Father’s Instructions: On landscapes, techniques and perspectives.”

12 “It has been well said indeed that there are different kinds of mountains. Some are good for climbing, some for looking up at from a distance, some for walks, and some for residence. When a painting can achieve this effect, it may be considered good. But those that are good for walks and for residence are preferable to those good for climbing or for looking up at from a distance.” Yutang Lin, The Chinese Theory of Art:Translations from the Masters of Chinese Art (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 72.

13 “For landscape, what was sacrificed was the ability and willingness to differentiate earth and rock texture, the differing leafage and branch structures of trees, the visual distinction of limpid and cloud spaces, along with the rendering of transient effects of light and atmosphere, indications of season and time of day.” Cahill, 15.

14 From the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127), poetic painting aesthetics began to be used as a methodology for garden construction. For example, the designer of the famous royal garden Genyue (艮岳, means mountain in the northeast corner) was Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty (1082–1135), a famous painter. In the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), when the poetic painting was revived, Ni Zan (1301–1374), a famous painter, built the Qingbi Pavilion(清閟閣) for himself. See Tianhua Liu, Huajing Wenxin: Zhongguo Gudian Yuanlin zhi Mei (Beijing:

SDX Joint Publishing, 1994), 229–236.

15 See Hongxun Yang, A Treatise on the Garden of Jiangnan: A study into the Classical Art of Landscape Desigh of China (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 1994), 241, 254.

16 Pai Hsien-yung gave a detailed introduction to the importance of modern musical lighting in expressing the fantastic plots in Kunqu Opera in an open class at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. See Hsien-yung Pai and Wei Hua, “Beauty of Kunqu Opera (崑曲之美)— 3. The youth version of The Peony Pavilion: Innovation in Costume and Stage Design (三、青春版《牡丹亭》：服裝與舞美的創新),” Coursera, accessed June 21, 2022, Video, 10:22, https://www.coursera.org/lecture/kunqu/san-qing-chun-ban-mu-dan-ting-fu-zhuang-yu-wu-mei-de- chuang-xin-B16Rv

17 The original word is “廳堂 (Tingtang)”, which means the salon of officials or nobles.

18 “The Salon Version of The Peony Pavilion will be staged in the Royal Granary” (The original text is in Chinese), News Sohu, April 16, 2007, http://news.sohu.com/20070416/n249466535.shtml

19 See Qianhui Feng, “Inner Awareness,” Interactive Architecture Lab, September 22, 2017, http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/lab-projects/inner-awareness

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cahill, James. The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University, 1996.

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Feng, Qianhui. “Inner Awareness.” Interactive Architecture Lab. September 22, 2017.

http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/lab-projects/inner-awareness

“The Salon Version of The Peony Pavilion will be staged in the Royal Granary (厅堂版昆曲《牡丹亭》将在皇家粮仓上演).” News Sohu. April 16, 2007. http://news.sohu.com/20070416/n249466535.shtml

Kuo, Hsi. “Lin-ch’üan Kao-chih (林泉高致),” in The Chinese Theory of Art: Translations from the Masters of Chinese Art, by Yutang Lin, 69–80. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967.

Laozi. Dao De Jing (道德經). Translated by Bruce R. Linnell. Project Gutenberg, 2015.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/49965/49965-pdf.pdf

Liu, Tianhua. Huajing Wenxin: Zhongguo Gudian Yuanlin zhi Mei (画境文心：中国古典园林之美). Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing, 1994.

Pai, Hsien-yung, and Wei Hua. “Beauty of Kunqu Opera (崑曲之美)— 3. Youth Version of The Peony Pavilion:

Innovation in Costume and Stage Design (三、青春版《牡丹亭》：服裝與舞美的創新).” Coursera. Accessed June 21, 2022. Video, 10:22. https://www.coursera.org/lecture/kunqu/san-qing-chun-ban-mu-dan-ting-fu- zhuang-yu-wu-mei-de-chuang-xin-B16Rv

Plekhanov, Georgi. “Unaddressed Letters (1899–1900), First Letter,” in Georgi Plekhanov Selected Philosophical Works, Volume 5. Translated by K. M. Cook and A. Fineberg, 263–294. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981.

“Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. 2018.

Accessed June 21, 2022. https://ich.unesco.org/en/lists

Tang, Xianzu, writer. The Peony Pavilion: Youyuan Jingmeng (遊園驚夢). Director by Xu Ke, featuring Mei Lanfang. Beijing, Beijing Film Studio, 1960. Accessed June 21, 2022.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNydt77MhzQ

Tang, Xianzu, writer. The Peony Pavilion. Director by Fang Ying, featuring Zhang Jiqing. Nanijing, Nanjing Film Studio, 1986. Accessed June 21, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWuEZkjK7ak

Tang, Xianzu, writer. The Peony Pavilion (Youth Version [青春版]). Produced by Pai Hsien-yung. Taipei, National Theater. Vedio. April 29, 2004. Accessed June 21, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn1du7m-vj8

“World Heritage List.” UNESCO World Heritage Convention. Accessed June 21, 2022.

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/

Yang, Hongxun. A Treatise on the Garden of Jiangnan: A study into the Classical Art of Landscape Design of China. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 1994.

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AMPS PROCEEDINGS SERIES 29.1

Front cover image: Jim Higham AMPS, University of Kent 15-17 June, 2022

Space or hyperspace? : the stage design of Kunqu opera restores the inner experience of Jiangnan gardens

ENVIRONMENTS BY DESIGN

HEALTH, WELLBEING AND PLACE

Sustainable Architecture(s) Humane Cities

AMPS Proceedings Series 29.1

HEALTH, WELLBEING AND PLACE

A conference on design, cuture and technology - past, present and future

(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

AMPS PROCEEDINGS SERIES 29.1

(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S): Design,

culture and technology – past, present, and

future

EDITOR:

Howard Griffin

EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION EDITOR:

Amany Marey

© AMPS

AMPS PROCEEDINGS SERIES 29.1. ISSN 2398-9467

INTRODUCTION

(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S): Design,

culture and technology – past, present, and future

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SPACE OR HYPERSPACE? THE STAGE DESIGN OF KUNQU OPERA RESTORES THE INNER EXPERIENCE OF JIANGNAN GARDENS

林泉高致

浮生六記

AMPS PROCEEDINGS SERIES 29.1

© AMPS